WEAR-TV and PNJ are trying to make a big deal of City Neighborhoods administrator Lawrence Powell and Parks & Rec director Adrian Stills going on administrative leave, insinuating that something nefarious is happening in city hall.
It’s not.
Personnel changes, especially at the senior level should be expected when a new mayor is elected.There are going to be staff changes in city government.
Why this matters: Some media feed on controversy. Powell and Stills have been offered severance packages of eight to 12 weeks and placed on administrative leave as they seek new jobs and as Mayor D.C. Reeves moves into a new direction.
Powell ran for mayor in 2018. When he failed to make it out of the primary, he endorsed Grover Robinson, who offered Powell a job when Robinson took office.
Stills was promoted by Mayor Robinson from golf course director to the Parks & Rec senior spot a year ago.
Dig Deeper: Mayor Reeves made it clear when he took office that he wouldn’t make leadership changes immediately and would spend at least 90 days assessing and evaluating.
The Reeves administration has hit the six-month mark.
The other media are not reporting the biggest departure – Dawn Rudolph is out as the president of Ascension Sacred Heart Hospital.
Ascension has been mum, and the hospital is a bigger advertiser for WEAR-TV and PNJ.
The media could submit a public records request to see all recent Personnel Action Forms and other public records related to the pending termination of Powell and Stills. It would be interesting to see who actually made these decisions and why. Section 3-15 in the city’s Human Resources Manual (page 153) gives several reasons for an employee being place on administrative leave, none of them good, to include the employee’s presence being detrimental to the work operation or where safety and security is a concern. An employee may also be placed on administrative leave “in conjunction with disciplinary procedures.” Administrative leave is done in 14 day increments and may be paid or unpaid. Both Powell and Stills are members of the city’s Senior Executive Services Group. When terminated, they are eligible for 20 weeks of severance pay not nine months. Powell’s problem was always he didn’t know anything about the city or its government. I know because I first talked to him when he ran Donna Clark’s mayoral campaign in 2014. He didn’t even know where Scenic Heights (where I live) was located. I spoke to Powell in 2018 when he was a mayoral candidate. He called me to get advice. I told him to drop out of the race because he still knew nothing about the city or the city government. I ran into Powell about a year after he got his patronage job and he still knew nothing. Stills was never qualified for his job. He mismanaged the city’s golf course so badly it required a $250,000 annual taxpayer subsidy only dropped to $200,000 this year. He made multiple errors and told multiple lies on his application but no one cared about because Deputy City Administrator Forte wanted to give him the job to pay Stills back for teaching him (Forte) to play golf when he was in 8th grade. Forte open said so in front of the council. I follow things in city hall and talk to people. I know of four specific things that Stills has badly botched. He has zero leadership or management ability. The fact that Stills couldn’t even successfully run the city’s golf course should have been a clue. When he screwed-up the day marina opening, I said that was the final straw. Reeves blew a gasket about it during a meeting. I said that Stills was going to be fired and here we are. I was several months back told that the forced resignation of City Attorney Peppler, done in a way to bypass the council’s constitutional role, was related to a disagreement with Mayor Reeves over how to handle certain bad personnel issues perhaps maybe to include how to dispose of Powell and Stills. I can think of a dozen senior city staffers I’d fire before these two but they both do need to go.